The founders of the Samourai Wallet (Samourai) cryptocurrency mixer have pleaded guilty to laundering over $200 million for criminals.
Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez and CTO William Lonergan Hill admitted to their involvement in the Samourai money laundering operation, pleading guilty to conspiracy for operating a money transmitting business that handled criminal proceeds, and are now facing a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
As part of their plea agreements, Rodriguez and Hill have also agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55.
The two defendants were arrested in April 2024 and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with two counts of conspiracy: operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business (with a maximum sentence of 5 years) and money laundering (with a maximum sentence of 20 years).
The day they were apprehended, Icelandic law enforcement also seized Samourai’s domains (samouraiwallet[.]com and samourai[.]io) and servers, while Google removed the Android mobile app from the Play Store after being served a seizure warrant.
While this operation was active, the Samourai Wallet mobile application was downloaded over 100,000 times, enabling users to conduct anonymous financial transactions.
According to court documents, Rodriguez and Hill have also promoted Samourai as a tool for concealing illicit proceeds, clearly acknowledging its potential for illegal use. In one instance, Rodriguez referred to “mixing” as “money laundering for bitcoin” in a WhatsApp exchange.
Hill also advertised Samourai on a dark web forum as a way to make Bitcoin “untraceable” and for “cleaning dirty BTC,” acknowledging that the service’s clients included dark and grey market participants.
In mid-2020, Rodriguez and Hill also tracked proceeds from a major hack and urged the hackers to use Samourai’s Whirlpool service rather than report the crime to the authorities. When the hackers chose a different service, both expressed disappointment on social media.
Between 2015 and February 2024, criminals used Samourai’s Whirlpool Bitcoin mixing service to process over 80,000 Bitcoins (valued at more than $2 billion) in illicit funds from cyber intrusions, illegal dark web markets, a spear phishing scheme, and schemes to defraud decentralized finance protocols.
In addition to its crypto mixing services, Samourai also offered “Ricochet,” a service that allowed users to send cryptocurrency through unnecessary intermediate transactions and thwart law enforcement and crypto exchange efforts to track funds sourced from criminal activities.
The two money laundering services allegedly generated over $6 million in fees from Whirlpool and Ricochet transactions for the two founders.
“The defendants created and operated a cryptocurrency mixing service that they knew enabled criminals to wash millions in dirty money, including proceeds from cryptocurrency thefts, drug trafficking operations, and fraud schemes,” said Attorney for the United States Nicolas Roos in a Wednesday press release.
“Rodriguez and Hill admitted to operating a money transmitting business that transmitted crime proceeds, essentially ‘washing’ more than $200 million in ‘dirty’ money for criminals. They did not just facilitate this illicit movement of money, but also encouraged it,” added IRS-CI Special Agent Harry T. Chavis, Jr.
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